Customer Reviews

Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a MUST for anyone interested in how history is interpreted and recorded. Francis Yates was a force unto her own in the field of historiography, meaning the techniques, theories and principles of the writing of history. Dr. Jones, a historian in her own right, should be congratulated for her research on Yates' belief in "the creative interaction of religion and culture in the life of Western society" and her seminal contributions to the field of interdisciplinary historiography. "Historical Inebriation" is the title of one of the chapters and it is, ultimately, what Jones so competently offers her readers.

Marjorie G. Jones tackles the life of Frances Yates, intellectual historian and literary critic with aplomb!
Jones is in her element as she presents the reader with a unique picture of an intrepid female Renaissance scholar "who saw history in creative and unconventional ways" and travelled in fascinating academic circles
Absorbing and elegant, this is an apt tribute to a pioneer, whom we might never have met without Jones' meticulous research and excellent use of Yates' journals.
BGR

Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition is the first full-length biography of Frances Yates, the female British historian and intellectual who wrote "Giordano Bruno and The Hermetic Tradition" and "The Art of Memory". Drawing upon excerpts from Yates' own diary and personal papers as well as exhaustive research, Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition recreates her scholarly career, and the cultural influences that shaped her interdisciplinary approach to history and literary criticism. A handful of black-and-white photographic plates illustrate this thoughtful biography, especially recommended for public and college library collections.

Marjorie Jones' important new biography of Frances Yates will be welcomed not only by those who knew her and by devoted Warbugians everywhere but also by students and other readers new to her brilliant scholarship on Bruno, Ficino, Pico, Shakespeare and a host of other Renaissance figures who were shaped or touched by the Hermetic tradition. Jones manages to keep her narrative lively while also pausing judiciously to describe with remarkable clarity each stage in Yates' prolific scholarship.

I just received the book this morning and finished it by the afternoon. I couldn't put it down! Having read most of Yates's work, something was lacking, and it was this biography. Marjorie Jones has a very sympathetic yet critically distant treatment of her subject that is refreshing and always enlightening. Yates's style can often be alienating because of her meticulous attention to details, the German-style footnoting (an army of footnotes), and the general tendencies of her time. Reading the pieces from her M.A. Thesis however made me laugh out loud. She captures the style of XXth c. historians writing on Catherine de Medici as the "femme fatale" of the sixteenth-century, and places in quotes "the Unhappy Charles" (the Queen's son). This is meant as Yates's youthful or scholarly (or both?) attack on the XXth c. style of historians who use expressions current in their own time and hardly realize that no sixteenth century writer would use such a description of the King of France. She is quite right, having fun...and she makes me laugh too.

Jones is an excellent writer and conveys a very different side of Yates that I did not know existed. This is the kind of work I love to read. It is deeply appreciative of the women who were writing such excellent work but are often ignored or pushed aside because they are women. To see this biography (the FIRST) expressing such true concern for important scholarly contributions mixed with a fine human touch leaves one wanting more.

One little error that threatens to become annoying because it is often repeated is the mispelled Macauley (should be Macaulay) But, in the spirit of Yates's High Anglican Catholic-loving sensibilities...who cares about the arch-Whig anyway, right?

Frances Yates and The Hermetic Tradition, by Marjorie G Jones. A review by David Frango. Title of the review: The Imaginative Catholic. Rate: 5 stars.

David Frango is the author of two books: The Ghost on the Brooklyn Bridge and The Quantum Enzyme Code: The Woman who Discovered the Cure for AIDS. The Quantum Enzyme Code won the 2006 ForeWord Magazine award for best Science Fiction. Both his books are available on Amazon.com


Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition is a biography of an English Woman historian born in the 1899. The heroine, a product of a strongly middle-class late Victorian family, as a young girl became an advocate for using literature as insight for interpreting history. The Yates family, solidly new middle-class in a time of rising merchant wealth, were observant Anglicans. And like most intellectuals of that period, they objected to certain social aspects of the Anglican church. For this reason Yates and her family sought spiritual revival in a mystical Catholicism which Yates herself described as "imaginative."
But the thematic essence of the book (Yates' gradual awakening to the Hermetic Tradition) comes to us in flashing insights into the mind of Ms Yates, spread throughout the entire length of the work as laid out by author Marjories G Jones. Reading the captured anecdotal thoughts of Yates, the real meaning of the Italian Renaissance is perceived as happening because some of the principal intellectuals of that period embraced Hermeticism: a spiritual blend of empirical science and a sort of Wiccan-like magic. For this reason the portion of the title, " Tradition," could be misleading, since as we gather data on this rather nebulous , yet mystical and historically pivotal principle known as Hermeticism, we come to realize it more as an inspirational Pythagorean force guiding certain historical figures of the renaissance in their acts of creation and thought.
Given Ms Yates' predilection for imaginative Catholicism and for her recognizing Italy as the focal point of all that is mysterious and magical about European culture, it is of no surprise that at an early age she should become magnetized by the founding father of modern (and by modern we mean the Hermetic Tradition as giving the start for the emergence of Modern Scientific European man ) Hermeticism, Giordano Bruno. Captivated by his "chestnut brown hair" and the fact that he spent a good part of his life in London, spreading Hermeticism, which, in due time, would even influence the works of Shakespeare. The Tempest, whose hero, Prospero, embraced a hermetic fusion of math and magic, was a perfect literary example for the spread of Hermetic Tradition to England. As for Giordano Bruno, it was in the year of our Lord 1600, in the Piazza Dei Fiori in Rome, that the handsome chestnut brown haired priest was burned at the stake by the inquisition.
And it is at this point where we can come to understand Hermeticism as seen through an unorthodox interpretation of history by Yates: that he was not burned because of his acceptance of the Copernican view of the solar system (the church by then completely accepted heliocentricity), but because at that time in history Catholicism was split between two conflicting views of theology: The NeoPlatonics and The Aristotelians. NeoPlatonism got their wisdom from Plato, via the ancient Hellenic cult of the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans received metaphysical light as they would pursue the study of mathematics and numbers by employing rationalism: in the ratios of harmonically plucked strings, our bodies, minds and spirits can come to reflect a cosmic mathematical musical aura. But this Platonic blend of matter and spirit was something the Aristotelians, who were positivistic, found offensive. According to Positivism authentic knowledge is based on sense experience, gotten through a strict, empirical scientific method, no mystical strings attached.. We can easily see the drama of NeoPlatonism and Aristotelianism as the classic conflict in Christendom where rule would either be spiritual or temporal.
The book does not detail the mechanics of the Platonic Bruno's death by pyre, as we know how Savonarola piqued the wrath of the Inquisition by his bonfire of the vanities in the mid 1400's. And so we are left to wonder what concrete criminal act Bruno could have done to outrage the Aristotelian inquisitors. Nevertheless we can contemplate along with Bruno himself and of course Yates, as we read the professionally presented insights of the hermetic tradition as seen through the magical prose of this gifted woman historian. For example, Yates on Rosicrucian Enlightenment, which was Hermetic in its outlook: "The subject is.....concerned with a striving for illumination, in the sense of vision, as well as for enlightenment...in intellectual or scientific knowledge." And that Hermeticism [which reminds the author of this review of Emily Dickinson] is like, "The Alone communing with the Alone." Yates realized great scientists of the late renaissance to be essentially Hermetic when she wrote Newton's mechanical universe was, "substituted for the psychic life of nature as the principle of movement, understood objectively instead of subjectively." This statement on Newton also expresses her [Yates'] historical belief clarifying the different perspectives of a scientist, such as Newton and a Renaissance magus, such as Bruno. For the magician "wants to draw the world into himself," while the scientist, "externalizes and personifies the world." Yates' Hermetic tradition was also pivotal to the emergence of modern scientific European man, as gathered from her book on Rosicrucianism where she says, " A religious movement using alchemy to intensify evangelical piety...including ...research and reform in the sciences."
The conflict of matter and spirit comes out in the last chapter of the book, Historical Inebriation," when in Budapest Hungary Yates lectures, "Newton, Descartes, Leibniz are still...within the enchanted world. Perhaps it was Darwin who discovered Man is not descended from...ancient Magi but from Apes." In this same chapter Dobbs, a colleague of Yates, wrote in a scholarly publication that she brilliantly emphasized matter-spirit relationships in her unorthodox interpretations of history.
Today, Physicists verify experimentally by a double-slit experiment that there is a strange wave/particle duality to sub-atomic particles. According to modern physics a particle is a material thing because it can be precisely located. And a wave is spiritual since a particle acting as a wave has the ghostly property of being able to be many places at once! And any historian of math will tell you that Pythagoras's cult of ratio and cosmic harmony forms the basis of modern Fourier Analysis, which today is indispensible in the development of new technologies.
Indeed, modern science does prove Yates to be absolutely correct: that matter and spirit is indeed the driving force of historical interpretation and the advent of modern technological man.